The NWP Whodunit teachers’ writing group met at the Tate Modern on Thursday 11 August to write and share.

​The group has met in London's cultural spaces for over three years and supported each other over 25 sessions. Teachers have combined business with pleasure by writing together. Writing voices have become distinctively layered, the writing culture has deepened, and the teaching of writing is commensurately rich and inclusive. Such are the professional benefits of this grass-roots project. The evidence that follows is a further contribution to the current conversation about the teaching of writing.

Writing in galleries, museums and parks is enriching, provocative, transformational, unexpected – but it does not always suit. Sometimes a private space is needed. Over the years of this project we have been lucky to find generous partners (British Library, Wellcome, Museum of London Docklands, Whitechapel, Tate) who have provided quiet rooms - for free - in which we have met and shared. The stimulation can overwhelm writers who are already engaged on their own projects, but they still welcome the opportunity to grow together professionally:

to hear how others have been inspired by exhibits which have resonated with their own condition,

to ponder the complexity of the writing process,

to value the discussions that spiral outwards to embrace families, selves and classrooms.

The scale of the Tate Modern tugged at the consciousness of many. There are the ghosts of brutal power in the building, and the ‘view from the bridge’ to the new Switch House, is vertiginous. The 70-foot drop to the huge turbine hall below, pixellated with people and echoing with indistinguishable voices, proved an irresistible stimulus for writing:

​Louise Bourgeois’ baggy figures in Artist Rooms combined, in the mind of one writer, with images from her recent Polish visit and her reading of the tales of Ossian to create the horrific and visceral depiction of the torture of Carglass, a warrior trussed shamefully on a sacrifice pole: ‘fear flew forward’. It still does.

Ai Weiwei’s tree - ‘lifeless, leafless, constructed’ stands in the huge grey hall, where all voices blend into one surreal acoustic. For one writer this conjured a dystopic Eden – ‘the hollow bowel of hope’.

The bridge itself became Bridge – the name of some sinister conurbation in writing reminiscent of Paul Stewart’s Edge Chronicles or Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines quartet.

In recent years, museum education has developed greater interactivity with the public. For example, the British Museum’s exhibits are no longer arm’s length but hands-on, and visitors’ responses are sought through writing prompts in the V&A and the Wellcome Collection, to name but two. I am pleased that I have recently had a proposal accepted to start a writing group at my local museum, with the opportunity for writers to have their writing ‘published’ alongside exhibits.

This project is the stronger, I hope, for being able not just to contribute to teachers’ and schools’ well-being and creative practice, but also to that of the wider community. After all, the world is a very big classroom.

​The summer 2016 edition of NAWE’s ‘Writing in Education’ illustrates many concerns familiar to NWP teachers. Daniel Xerri from the University of Malta, makes a compelling case for creative writing workshops for teachers’ education and development (www.danielxerri.com) Kate Pawsey explains how adults’ creativity can be stimulated through writing (writingtimewithkatepawsey.weebly.com/about.html). Clare Scott writes about Lapidus, UK’s national organisation for writing for well-being (www.lapidus.org.uk/). Robert Hull exposes the damage done to writing by the primary school tests, while Kevan Manwaring expounds on the creative potential of freewriting:

‘The best freewrites are of course wild, that is ludic, exploratory, transgressive and syntactically feral. .... The best writing does not emerge through narrow commercial imperatives or through a checklist of techniques, a dry naming of parts. We must create a culture of learning, knowledge, open-mindedness, exploration, and invention.’

With similar issues of teacher education in mind, Jeni and I met last week to refine our plans for the first NWP residential. 10 experienced writing teachers will join us in October to review what has been learnt from the first seven years of the project. Our aim is to secure writing’s position in a pedagogy of the imagination, strengthen the network of teachers’ writing groups, and thereby contribute to the conversation about writing in education.

Be it personal, social or professional, writing engages the heart and challenges the mind. Writing has a wide reach and the power to reorient learning. Writing may be playful or prescribed, tender or explosive, long drawn out or dashed off in a jiffy, exploratory or particular, undertaken with others or alone; writing may be private and provisional - or it may be edited, high-stakes, public, judged. With such a range, writing’s scope can seem so unmanageable for schools, that prioritising convention may seem reasonable. But when this happens, writing’s dynamic potential to enable all learners to discover themselves and the world can, ironically, be lost.

However, by having a safe space to write and reflect, writing teachers can, with the conviction born of experience, re-orient themselves professionally and, by providing pupils with a fuller experience of writing, better help them to experiment, adopt strategies, make choices and find their voices.

​For any writing teacher unfamiliar with the benefits of writing groups, there is an opportunity to take part in one, this Thursday, 11 August, at the Tate Modern, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. Fill in the contact form for further details.